Workers started with that use case, but these days we're definitely aiming to be a general-purpose platform for app hosting, especially for new apps. It sounds like we're not getting that message across very well.
Not just the message; the docs, and even the internal structure of the Workers section of the CF dashboard, are also lacking on describing how to approach building a greenfield app using Workers.
I recently tried to build a Worker-based app for a personal project, after a few months of not having touched Workers, having only previously used them at $work for the "decorator of legacy backend" use-case. I knew what capabilities Workers had, and knew exactly what I wanted to do... but getting it up and running was still confusing!
One specific example: trying to figure out how to get a production-quality workflow for maintaining and deploying a worker.
- It's actually hard to notice the "Edit Code" button on a Worker's overview. I flipped through all the other tabs twice before noticing it.
- Then, after getting in there, I remembered how useless the web IDE is for testing, when the domain is fronting a bucket named after a custom domain associated with a Workers Route rather than with the canonical name of the worker. So I wanted to set up the worker to deploy from a Github Action.
- But how do I do that? Can I go into "Integrations" and select "Github Repo"? (No.)
- I figure that the Wrangler CLI will set me up for doing on-push deploy. So I download it. (It doesn't.)
- Also, the CF Workers docs tell me to install the wrangler NPM package and run `npx wrangler init`. But once I do, that command itself tells me that it's deprecated, and that I'm supposed to run `npm create cloudflare\@2.5.0`.
- I read through the Wrangler docs and figure out that it's a "build a local slug from your worktree and push it" kind of deployer, rather than a "build a deploy from a git ref and push it" kind of deployer. So I figure, to enable GitOps deploys, I'll need an action that runs Wrangler itself on Github Actions. I search the Workers docs, and the Wrangler CLI docs (separate site) for this. Neither one mentions this possibility.
- I end up just googling "wrangler github action" and finding https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler-action. Great! I add it to the new Github repo that Wrangler created, and add the relevant secret.
You know what this could have been instead? A button on the Workers dashboard — or even on a CF marketing landing page! — that 1. SSOs the user into Github; 2. automates the creation of a new repo that gets pre-populated with a Worker skeleton project + this Wrangler workflow already committed to it + the correct relevant secret already bound into the repo; and then 3. drops me into either the Workers IDE (modified to connect to the repo by creating PR branches + committing to them for "drafts", and merging those PRs for "publish"), or alternately, into Github Codespaces with the Workers IDE stuff reimplemented as a VSCode preview plugin. (And same for Gitlab, etc.)
